ubjects printed on canvas.
Then a batch of Station No. 1, perhaps some six or eight canvases at a
time, are given out to artist No. 1, who puts in the landscape and
surroundings; from there they go to artist No. 2, who paints the
draperies, and finally to No. 3, who fills in heads, hands, and feet.
Irmanno was No. 2. We placed the pictures ready for treatment all round
the room. Then we started with one colour, say dark red, for the shade
of a certain drapery; when that had been repeated on all the canvases,
came the turn of the middle tint, and finally of the light red. Then
came the next colour--I need not say they were all prescribed--and when
we had made the round with that, the next, and so on until all the
draperies were satisfactorily disposed of.

The proceedings were only varied when Irmanno lay down on the red brick
floor and groaned, and pretended to have a sort of attack. I did not
mind, because when the evil spirit was upon him, he always looked
particularly interesting.

Next door, in the twin garret, Dupont was putting heart and soul into
the production of his first picture; it was still in its initial stages,
but studies small and large, in pencil and in chalks, were gradually
covering the walls. His subject was "The raising of the daughter of
Jairus," and he would never tire of talking to me about the grand
opportunities it afforded to the artist. He would question me too on
things connected with mesmerism (I was mesmerising in those days), and
would want to know all about the first symptoms of awaking from a
trance, of the action of the hand as it makes passes, and the dictates
of the eye as it bids the subject sleep or wake. "Christ, the God," he
wrote to me in a letter of a later date, "can never be depicted,
translated into human forms, but Christ the Healer, Christ the Helper,
and He, the lover of children, is perhaps approachable. Give me a
lifetime, and possibly I may decipher a little of what is to be read
between the lines of the New Testament."

The summer had set in early and rather savagely, as it will do sometimes
in Paris, and the heat in those ex-garrets of the Rue de Seine was
stifling.

Rosa Bonheur Sinel did what she could to mitigate the evil. Rosa Sinel
was her real name, but somebody had nicknamed her Rosa Bonheur, and in
course of time her father had worked himself into the belief that the
great artist had been her godmother. She was a precocious little woman,
somewhere betwee